Here's what it looks like when a popular NFL player explains complicated math

Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel announced
on Twitter this week his plan to start his
Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology this year.

The 24-year-old, 305-pound lineman has a well-documented aptitude
for math. He earned his bachelor's degree in three years at
Penn State and spent his senior year working on a master's
degree in mathematics while being paid by Penn State to teach
Integral Vector Calculus Trigonometry.

Urschel recently paired up with marketing tech company Persado to explain how
math concepts are used in marketing. He starts with a relatively
simple concept, explaining what an algorithm is. "At its core an
algorithm is just a set of steps to try to work toward some goal
to obtain some outcome," Urschel says.

"A great example is Google's multi-armed bandit algorithm," he
continues.

The multi-armed bandit informs Google about how different ads are
performing and rearranges them according to how well they do, he
explains.

Urschel also explains that so-called attribution techniques are
essential in marketing. "There
are a number of different attribution techniques that try to
distribute the weight of a customer buying a desired product to
each ad the customer saw in terms of how much it influenced
them," he says.

This may sound complicated, but an example he uses about a
customer buying a pair of Nike shoes clarifies his point.

He says to imagine a customer got an email from Nike about a pair
of shoes, but he doesn't click on the link. Later, the Nike shoes
show up on the side of Google as an ad, but he doesn't click the
link. Eventually, he goes to Nike.com and buys the shoes. "How
much weight do we attribute each [ad]?" Urschel asks.

That problem is central to attribution and is central in
marketing, he says.

Watch the video below to see what Urschel has to say
about math and marketing.